Is High Maintenance the Show of Our Generation?

One of the unique things about living in New York is the fact that you can order anything—dinner, groceries, batteries, even pot—straight to your door. It might seem crazy, letting a complete stranger who is obviously doing something illegal into your home, but these days, the pot-delivery guy seems to be almost as common as FreshDirect. That’s one reason why the new Web series High Maintenance feels so relevant. Created by husband-and-wife duo Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, the show follows a marijuana messenger—played by Sinclair, who looks like John Malkovich, if Malkovich had a Bushwick beard and rode a fixie—as he goes in and out of people’s apartments delivering merchandise from his Tupperware container.

A smart way of looking into the intersecting lives of eclectic New Yorkers, the series mainly takes place in the condo and loft land of Williamsburg. Most of the customers who call “the guy” are in their twenties or early thirties and working in some sort of creative career. They’re also a privileged set—few of these people seem to have steady or high-paying jobs, yet most of them have enough disposable income to buy pot—and “Do you know what I mean?” is uttered in uptalk in almost every episode.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. High Maintenance is set in the same universe as Girls. But to answer the question posed by Lena Dunham’s character, Hannah, on whether she was the “voice of her generation,” this underrated Web series is a lot more accurate in depicting the lives of millennials today. High Maintenance might actually be the show of our generation.

When Girls started, I remember identifying with Hannah during the opening scene, when her parents share the news that they’re cutting her off. It’s a conversation most of us who graduated during the recession had with our own families—mine took place six months after commencement. Later on, I had flashbacks to a dingy electronic party I was dragged to in Long Island City, after I saw the episode where the four friends end up in a remote warehouse rave in Brooklyn. Every week, my group of friends couldn’t help but notice the parallels between the protagonists and their own lives. One wasn’t that into her hopelessly sweet boyfriend and couldn’t find the heart to break up with him, much like Marnie and Charlie. Another had an ex who came out years after their relationship ended, and yet they both remained very close after that, à la Elijah and Hannah.

But then something happened as the seasons progressed, and we all lost that connection we once felt with Girls. Marnie became too out of touch. Shoshanna started sounding like a caricature. Jessa had a quickie marriage that never made any sense, and Hannah got a book deal seemingly out of thin air. These were not the issues we were facing day to day. The show was no longer relatable.

I felt the opposite once I started watching High Maintenance. The first episode I saw was titled “Jamie,” and found two roommates discovering a still-live mouse on a glue trap in their kitchen, calling their pot dealer for help (and a joint to calm their nerves). I emailed the clip to my old roommate with no explanation necessary. “The traumatic end to the mouse-glue-trap-creature we locked in our bathroom still gives me nightmares,” she later said over cries of laughter. “Dinah” showed a glimpse of a couple’s fridge covered with dozens of wedding invitations. “See, we’re not alone,” I pointed out to my husband, who earlier this summer told me he wished we could stop planning our vacations around our friends’ far-flung weddings.

There are clever pop-culture references sprinkled throughout, from Petra Collins’s temporary Instagram ban to House of Cardsbinge-watching to juice cleanses—“She’s looking good since she started doing Blueprint,” says one of the characters in “Olivia.” And that’s just one of the quotable lines the series constantly churns out: “Her Tumblr is actually beautiful” and “I’m a proud A-sexual” sound like things we’ve all heard someone say on the L train at some point.

But it’s not all vapidity and vaporizers. The series also deals with the more troublesome aspects of life. One explores the inability of a comedian (played by Hannibal Buress) to Tweet jokes after a shooting at one of his stand-up gigs. Perhaps even more terrifying is the story of a girl who takes the cute guy from her spin class back home only to realize he’s a total creep and not at all as he originally seemed—any single girl’s worst nightmare come true.

Blichfeld and Sinclair’s well-written series was financed mostly by them in the past, but has now thankfully won a round of funding from Vimeo, which is trying to get into the Netflix producing game. With this development and a rave review by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, it seems High Maintenance is about to find a much larger audience.

One of their last episodes featured Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens as a stay-at-home dad who’s also a cross dresser with a preference for Rachel Comey. He’s perhaps the biggest name to be cast in High Maintenance so far, but I have a feeling more mainstream actors will turn up in the next batch of episodes, set to be released on Vimeo’s site later this year. Who knows, maybe even Lena Dunham will stop by.